In a push to increase collaboration between the UK and Canada on industrial uses of AI, the UK government has teamed up with Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier to offer a prize for ideas which solve an interesting problem – an optimal, self managing de-icing strategy for aircraft. De-icing causes extra fuel burn – either to…

In what must have been a fun project, creative agency redpepper has built a robot which can play Where's Wally (Waldo in the US) using Google's AutoML Machine vision service. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i7HMPpxB-Y We built a little robot called “There’s Waldo” to test the capabilities of Google’s new AutoML Vision service. We’ve found that technologies can be…

As more and more teams work with the Arcade Learning Environment to train RL models on Atari games, it becomes more important to a) ensure that comparisons are truly like-for-like and reproducible, and b) find ways to speed up and simplify model iteration. Google has developed a Tensorflow framework, called Dopamine, allowing researchers to focus…

One problem with existing training methods for unsupervised learning used in human language translation is the availability of text "pairs" (such as the same sentence written twice) between obscure languages – such as Welsh to Urdu. Facebook is testing out a new mechanism involving "word embeddings" – vector-space representation of words in a given language…

Looking for a way to pick up Python? Georgia Institute of Technology recently launched Code Shrew, a free, web-based learning platform for Python and object-oriented programming. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/07/code_shrew_python/ Shrew’d thinking: Code Shrew helps peeps who want to, or need to, gobble a slice of Py

A recently published poll shows that Americans are turning cold on one of the hottest technology frontiers – self-driving cars. A recent study showed that nearly half of drivers now say they'd "never" buy a Level 4 autonomous car, up from 30% two years ago, and Level 2 automation (which is recognised as being risky…

Boston Dynamics has finally started to pivot from research towards manufacture of commercial products, with the following uses as priority: – entertainment – the first and easiest scenario – emergency response – eg search and rescue, surveillance – Security – think about automating property line walks etc. Longer term, they see their devices: – warehouse…

In a clear message to publishers (“We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic…That is the old world and there is no going back”), Facebook has reminded them both of the power it wields, and of their responsibilities – it’s not Facebook’s job to revive the business model of old school publishing,…

At $10,000 for the top end card, NVIDA is clearly aiming these at professional video editing suites, but the addition of built in Tensor Core units aims to speed up end to end editing of film and game graphics – perhaps automating the removal of guide wires from shots, or removing artefacts or entire actual…

AI models are complex and take time and compute power to generate – meaning they're expensive and valuable. IBM has been developing a way to "watermark" deep learning models by embedding specific information in to the model during training such that it's impossible (or very hard) to remove later, allowing definitive identification of model theft.…